Well it’s been a while…

… And I’m finally posting something to my blog. I recently did an unusual shoot. The project was for an ad agency and their client that makes huge industrial castors. This things are beasts and built to handle thousands of pounds each. The project was to shoot 12 images from different angles of a particular castor so they can be used on the company’s website. It will be animated so that you can click on the image and be able to rotate it so you can see it from 12 different angles.

This is more difficult when you have to make sure your angles are accurate and lighting is consistent from one image to the next. Here’s the way we solved the problems. First we marked where the castor would be suspended by a boom by monofilament line. Then around that point we marked each of the camera angles we needed (it took a little geometry, some string, and some gaffers tape).

The setup to shoot the 360 of the castor.

As we moved the camera from one point to another, we moved the lighting and a white card used for the background correspondingly. Each of the images will be outlined before they are given to the web developers to animate.

I shoot a lot of industrial photography and one thing I learned early on is that not things given to me to photograph are not often pretty. The reason being, a lot of these products are made to be durable and function under extreme conditions. Most of the time they are not made to be aesthetically pleasing. So when this castor came in, it wasn’t looking at it’s best. In most cases with agencies or companies with larger marketing departments, I don’t retouch the images. They have graphic designers that do that. The only time I retouch is when I am working for the company manufactured the product or I am asked to. (Photos of people are very different and I don’t let anyone else retouch those).

So, for the purpose of the blog, I retouched one of the photos so you can see an example of a before and after. Here is the before:

Before Retouching

And here is the after shot:

After Retouching

Now I could have gone overboard and done more retouching, but since this was for the blog and not a client, I wasn’t inclined to spend a lot of time on it. The amount of time spent retouching depends on the amount of work that needs to be done and how much the client wants done and is willing to pay for. It’s another reason why I try to impress upon my clients that it’s in their best interest to provide the best possible examples of their products that they can. It makes my job easier and saves them money.

Well that’s it for now.

Thanks for reading!!

-Ken